Dreams of Damnation
by ShinobiCyrus
Summary: Tormented by nightmares, damned in a self imposed Hell. But even Vincent's waking moments offer no relief. Oneshot. Brief blood and gore, violence, mild language, and disturbing depictions. An account of Vincent's suffering in Hojo's lab 30 years ago.


Disclaimer: Final Fantasy VII is the brainchild of Square. I, however, am not nearly that creative

Vincent staggered weakly through the dim tunnel, his free hand leaning against the jagged stone wall, the other clutching his torn chest. The gunshot wound Hojo had given him was quite a bleeder; scarlet stained most of his white dress shirt as free droplets trickled onto his scuffed black leather shoes.

The Turk's thoughts were cloudy, his mind trapped in a dreamlike haze as he stumbled mindlessly deeper into the tunnel. How long had it been since Hojo shot him? Time was a fleeting, intangible thing. A professional- and a Turk- at heart, Vincent still had enough sense to berate himself for getting shot by a deranged scientist dumb enough to shoot him with a measly .22. But Vincent had been so adamant, emotional- _furious, _even. Hojo had caught him off guard. _Him. Vincent Valentine._ An experienced gunman shot head-on by a sniffling weasel who had probably never even fired a gun before.

Along with everything else, the whole thing was just Goddamn disgraceful.

By some hidden strength he both thanked and loathed, Vincent finally cleared the tunnel, his expensive shoes (courtesy of Shin-Ra's high pay) echoing off the floor of some sort of ice cavern. Multi-colored lights danced from within the ice like ghosts, the full spectrum of it all made it seem to Vincent like he was inside a giant, bright prism. The far end of the cave had been chiseled and carved into something resembling an ancient church. Towering pillars of ice supported the high-arched roof as elaborate carvings scrolling across the walls told some forgotten story of fire, disaster, plague, and demons. An altar of stone, a crude contrast to the splendor of the ice, sat alone in frozen cave.

The Turk paled when he saw the woman laying on the altar, angelic in her beautiful white dress, belly swollen in the final stretch of pregnancy. She writhed in blinding agony on the stone cold altar, not noticing Vincent's arrival. His heart plummeted as she lay there, alone and screaming from the pain of labor. But as much as his heart desperately wanted to comfort her, Vincent was rooted helplessly where he stood, as if the ice froze him there. He was paralyzed and powerless, he could not even call out to her.

It was a nightmare that stretched time; so long Vincent was forced to watch her in such pain- unable to do a thing to help his beloved Lucretia.

The stone altar was flooded with Lucretia's blood, streaming to the floor like a slowly cascading waterfall. Her breath was rasp and heavy, sweat from long exertion glistening off her hot brow. Glowing brighter as it rainbow lights wavered wildly, the ice above Lucretia's altar began to change, taking the shape of a terrifying, alien thing.

It had the form of a beautiful, nude woman, her skin an exotic, pale purple. Long white hair curtained protectively over her face, teasing and entrancing Vincent with only a glance of an eye tinged with pink-colored fire. She hovered over Lucretia's thrashing body like the Angel watching over Saint Mary- that was what she was: an angel suspended in the air by withered, eroded wings. She was a celestial beauty; a Higher Being of magnificence more chillingly inhuman than the cold of the Ice Cave could ever hope to aspire.

"Jenova," Vincent breathed.

Blinded by childbirth, Lucretia noticed not when Jenova slowly floated down to the floor. The alien thing leaned over Lucretia, cradling the poor woman's head to her breast in an almost comforting way. Vincent shuddered as his beloved's shrieks of agony reached piercing heights, damning himself over and over again at his own powerlessness. Jenova's beautiful, alien hand stroked Lucretia's swollen belly-which seemed to push her labor pains to their absolute limit.

Jenova slowly raised her head to meet Vincent's gaze. Through the screen of white hair, Vincent clearly saw a twisted, Cheshire Cat grin.

Blood sprayed violently as a long hand clawed from within Lucretia's stomach. Jenova crooned with delight as the woman beneath her convulsed and screamed.

His wounded chest forgotten, Vincent screamed a heartbroken denial with her.

The obscene hand still writhing from her stomach, Lucretia burst into flame, burning alive in a shrieking funeral pyre. In seconds, the fire widened and spread like a thing alive, consuming Lucretia, the altar, and Jenova into the crackling flames.

Still fixed where he stood, Vincent closed his eyes to fight back the despair building there, uncaring as his own self-loathing pushed his lifeblood from his torn chest. But even as the fire grew, the ashes swirled almost intelligently. Mingling and clumping together, the ashes began taking the shape of black feathers- until they finally coalesced into a single shape within the solid wall of flame.

A man about Vincent's age stood unbothered in the flames, long white hair thrashing with the licking flames. He was unearthly handsome; bright emerald green eyes smoldering with a heat and power greater than any fire. Unconcerned with his nakedness, he stepped from his the inferno like some perverse newborn.

An angelic black wing unfurled behind his bare right shoulder, hands commanding the flames until they took the form of a long, sinuously curved sword that no mortal man could wield.

Sephiroth smiled wickedly at Vincent, raising his infamous Masamune for the killing stroke. His hand still glistened with his own mother's blood.

The blade blurred forward like a javelin.

And struck Vincent in the heart.

The Turk awoke screaming, the pain from his nightmare bleeding into reality. His breath was sharp and panting, every beat of his heart seemed to pump burning acid through his fragile veins. Instinctively trying to curl tightly and clutch his burning breast, Vincent met heavy resistance when he tried to move. Cold shackles on his bare ankles and wrists kept him bolted securely on a medical examination table. Except for the pants of his Turk uniform, all of Vincent's clothes were missing. He shuddered as a drafty wind reeking of rot and mildew bit goosebumbs into his bare skin.

"Back amongst the living are we?" a hauntingly familiar voice sneered.

The only light in the room was a heavy lamp overhead that kept his eyes from adjusting to the surrounding gloom. But after a few moments, the Turk found he could at least make out shapes close to him.

Hojo leered over him like a vulture, the hooked nose his narrow glasses rested on only adding to the effect. Greasy black hair slicked back immaculately left an unfortunately clear view of his face; sickly pale, a thin film of skin stretched over the sharply protruding shapes of bones.

That nauseating face filled Vincent's whole view; that crooked beak nose almost poking his cheek as those slitted, beady eyes studied him like a live butterfly pinned down by a needle.

The scientist's rancid breath choked Vincent's air. Hojo never was one for personal hygiene. "How do you feel?"

"Get the hell away from me you deranged son of a bitch," Vincent managed to growl weakly.

"Subject conscious and responsive, good, good," he muttered to himself. "Tell me Vincent, how was hell?"

"Your mother says 'hi'," the Turk spat.

Hojo tittered shrilly like some mad parrot at that. _God, what a loathsome laugh. _

"Did she now?" he crooned. "In that case, I hope she was as good for you as she was for me."

Vincent snorted in disgust.

"I must say, I'm glad I managed to revive you," the madman went on. "Experiments can only go so far on corpses, after all."

Pulling back a few steps, Hojo pulled roughly at something on Vincent's chest, igniting a renewed chorus of screams. The pain was not comparable to when he had awoken; these screams were inspired more by horrified terror. When Hojo walked back, it cleared Vincent's vision, allowing him to see how Hojo had exactly revived him.

His chest was bisected with surgical care, ribs split apart to allow access to his sickly beating heart.

"You were officially dead for six minutes," Hojo said, deaf to the screams. "In fact, I'm sure I must have broken a few medical records with just that. The bullet wound's healed nicely I must say."

Hojo set the long, bloody syringe he had pulled out of Vincent's heart onto a small metal table and wheeled it away into the darkness. All Vincent could hear was the Hojo's mad ranting and the clatter of instruments being set and rearranged. The table's wheels squeaked cheerfully as Hojo pushed it back into the light, carrying wicked, thin, and sharp medical instruments lined meticulously in neat rows.

"Was death akin to sleeping, Valentine?" Hojo asked with a cruel grin. "Was hell a nightmare you could never awaken from?"

Vincent trembled as Hojo buckled the harness that would hold his head firmly to the examination table. Pride and defiance reminded him not to give the sick bastard any satisfaction willingly, but shudder uncontrollably he still did.

Head fixed and forced to stare up at the ceiling, Vincent saw only a glance of the new syringe Hojo held between his fingers. It was smaller, but the needle was much longer, and thinner too. He caught only a sickly green glow from the corner of his eye as Hojo slowly brought it forward; Vincent felt a bead of sweat run down from his brow to the temple.

"I hope hell is like a nightmare my precious," Hojo whispered maliciously. "I'm going to ensure your every waking moment is a hell come alive."

Then he stabbed the syringe deeply into Vincent's temple.

Whenever exposed in normal human interaction, Hojo was clearly marked as a skinny, weak, blundering, unstable sociopath with a severe inferiority complex. But when Hojo was in his laboratory, _his _world, he stopped somewhere just shy of God.

He fully delivered his oath to Vincent, masterfully implementing torture and science until it seemed only the greatest of scientific accomplishments was measured by the experiment's depravity.

Among the countless other substances Hojo injected into his 'experiment', Vincent was also kept fully awake by high doses of stimulants. Some of Hojo's worst experimentation trials lasted for days, even as long as a week or more with scarcely a space of time in between. That perverse madman seemed to have almost inhuman stamina, kept awake and perfectly alert only by the progress he made with his favorite specimen. For Vincent, that time was indeed a waking nightmare. Just like a dream, time was untrustworthy and intangible. Hojo had a talent for making apparent hours of torture out of only a few minutes, the endless stretches of days with only drugs keeping him awake was a lifetime of intimate moments with the devil.

Whenever Hojo needed rest or simply wanted to catch up on his notes and prepare the next experiment, he would summon two Shin-Ra guards to drag him off to the nearby cellar and lock him away alone in the darkness. In all his time with Hojo, Vincent never ate once, sustained only by the nutrients the IV fed him during an experiment. Worse yet, whatever it was Hojo was doing to him made him more resilient, and his stamina increased after each trial, lengthening each experiments longer and longer.

Sometimes the aftereffects of Hojo's tinkering were worse than the actually implementation. Even without drugs, Vincent laid awake in pitch darkness of the cellar for hours, gnawing his own skin, clawing at the spots were Hojo injected something. His blood burned through his entire body like acid, even the sweat creeping from his pores seemed ablaze. But sleep won out sometimes, and whenever it did, Vincent's sleep was a separate torture all of its own. It was a self-inflicted punishment, the ex-Turk nightmaring of his doomed beloved and his own crippled inability to do nothing but watch her in agony.

All too often, Vincent considered the drugs that kept him awake for long hours of torture a small salvation that kept his sanity.

_Subject: Jenova Project, Prototype #-022_

_Private notes of Professor Hojo, Newly Instated Head of Jenova Project _

_The thirty-sixth experiment went well, subject shows increased resistance during Pain Threshold experiments. Advanced Mutation rate exceeds all of my past estimates; What started as nothing more than an amusing pet in the Jenova Project is fast becoming an important basis for further research. Incredibly, Valenti- the subject has long passed the Mako limit of past experiments. Where they've died, he's not only lived, but thrived! Though I lack data, I believe the Jenova cells I've injected into him have changed him in unforeseen ways. To test my theory, I've thoroughly dissected most of the subject's left arm and have directly infused exceedingly high levels of Mako and Jenova cells into his bone marrow and muscles. The proceeding reactions were simply amazing. It's a Mutation at a level I've never seen before. Of all my other subjects, only young Sephiroth has yielded such absolutely wonderful results. _

_Oddly, his skin tissue seems to have developed an curious side affect of such intense treatment. The subject has developed a kind of albinism, he is almost ghostly white now, and his eyes have taken a red hue- perhaps the natural pigments of his body were altered during the Mako treatments- but yet there's been no changes in his hair. In fact, it seems to have gotten even darker. I'm sure further research will reveal the cause of such puzzling reactions._

_Updates up to the Forty-Ninth experiment: _

_It would appear as any hopes I've had of breeding creatures like Vincen Subject #-022 have ended in failure. Long and intense experimentation on Subject's reproductive system has succeeded only of confirming sterility. Further dissections performed on the subject's eyes confirmed there was indeed an alteration of his body's natural pigments, but no clue to why his hair was not turned white as Sephiroth's was. In addition, the latest trials have indeed confirmed subject's ever-increasing pain tolerance. _

_Mutation in the subject's physical structure has become unstable, his shape is shifting and changing on occasion now. Left arm has become exceedingly abnormal. His fingertips are forming into claws now, and the skin on that arm has developed some sort of black growth on the external tissue. The rash is most certainly painful to the subject, and unnaturally color fluids are poring from cracks in the skin. _

_I believe the subject's body is having an allergic reaction to the particularly concentrated Jenova cells located there, and already his immune system is trying to reject it. Most fascinating. The Human body seems to consider Jenova cells an invading substance. I have decided to categorize this intriguing new reaction to Jenova cells as Geostigma. Strange. Why would the body act so violently to such a beneficial element as Jenova? Humans were once Ancients, my theories clearly state that exposure to a primordial being like Jenova would have positive effects on humans, not mutate them so grotesquely. Considering Sephiroth's fantastic progress, I can only conclude these developments on the fault of Subject #-022. Fruitful as it was, it would appear this branch of research has come to a dead end. The subject is of no longer use to the Jenova Project and will thus be effectively disposed of after final test samples are taken. _

Gasping, Vincent abruptly awoke from another nightmare; bolting upright and throwing the white shroud that covered him while he slept.

But had he truly slept?

Or…

The shackles undone, Vincent slowly swung off the gurney in Hojo's lap and carefully set his weary feet onto the cold dungeon floor. His left arm and head ached underneath the bandages they were wrapped under, the ex-Turk's free hand tentatively feeling the spots on his head where Hojo and stuck needles and wires to 'monitor direct brain activity'.

A bolt of pain suddenly ran up from the nerves of his wounded arm to his head, tearing his mind apart with static images of he couldn't register or understand. When the pain finally subsided, Vincent realized he was on his knees, clutching the arm that had been shaking and convulsing moments before; a green fluid slowly seeping from beneath the bandages.

The dungeon's heavy wooden door opening, the two Shin-Ra MPs that often carried him to and from the cellar screeched in shock when they entered.

"But…how? I thought Hojo said he put this thing down!"

The three stood motionless, staring at each other in a stricken silence. Vincent's crimson eyes slowly narrowed, fragmented memories of the soldiers laughing and hooting as they roughly dragged him from Hojo's lab…or when they took him there.

The Shin-Ra soldiers began raising their rifles, but were far too late. Snatching the shroud that had covered his mistakenly dead body, he vanished in a flourish as white. Writhing like a thing possessed, the sheet darted towards the MPs like gliding oil. They managed only a few paniced shots until Vincent exploded impossibly from within the veil.

Left arm twisted by feral claws, the first MP died instantly when Vincent savagely tore his head from his shoulders. The second soldier managed a final desperate gunshot into Vincent's chest before his gun was wretched from his grasp. While his death was not a instantaneous as his fellow's, the last MP died quickly enough (though painfully) as Vincent literally ripped him into bloody pieces of meat.

Drenched in the vanquished blood, Vincent stood there hunched and panting, left arm slick and red. Logic slowly returned to a mind that had so long been dulled by torment. Killing those men had been so easy. _Pathetically_ easy. That last soldier even managed a final shot before he died, but Vincent had shrugged the bullet off without a second thought.

But what truly terrified him was _the other_. A part of him had enjoyed that bloodbath, that massacre. Something born from the shadows of his past, something that reveled in Vincent's previous life as a Turk. How many men had he expertly killed with the simple squeeze of a finger? How many times had he washed blood off the expensive suit Shin-Ra had given him?

And for what? Money? No. Vincent was not a material person.

**'The Thrill,'** said the Other. **'The Thrill of dominating death, the lust of victory, and the wonderful ecstasy of killing.'**

Vincent stared at his scarlet soaked hands. "Hojo may have made me something other than a man," he whispered to himself. "But I made myself a Monster."

Seizing the shroud now stained red, Vincent fled into the cramped, dark cellar he spent many sleepless nights in. And some even worse sleepful nights. Lucretia had been his one chance of salvation, his one opportunity away from the plague of blood, death, and the reek of gunpowder. But he was undeserving of her, he had failed her, and thus- assured his own damnation.

As he brooded these thoughts of self-torturing doom, Vincent's shape warped and hazed. The pants of his old Turk suit darkened, spreading like ink over his bare chest until he now wore new jet-black slacks and a tunic. The bandages on his arm yellowed and hardened until they were a dull gold melting into the shape of a clawed gauntlet to hide his malformed hand.

The bandage around his head deepened its own bloodstains until it became a crimson bandanna. Finally, the bloody shroud that covered Vincent's sleeping corpse reshaped itself to its master's unconscious wishes, materializing into a scarlet, writhing cloak. Unaware of his metamorphosis, Vincent single handedly brought one of the old, heavy coffins off the wall onto the floor. Pulling up its creaking lid, he climbed inside musty old thing and let it's cover fall back behind him.

Vincent had stopped being useful to Hojo, so the scientist had tried to kill him. But Vincent knew he could not die. He was doomed forever, trapped to wander a world of pain, blood, and death. But he was determined for the Other to sin against the world no more, so Vincent willed himself to fall into a deep sleep, where Lucretia and his deserved nightmares in Hell awaited him.

**Author's notes: My first fanfiction I've posted on this site. I'm admittingly new at this, so any thoughts or comments would be appreciated. Thanks alot for taking the time to read this, I know it was kinda long. **


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